Mena Mitrano is Associate Professor of American literature and language in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her research area is theoretical-critical thought, which she explores from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her work covers major critical theorists (Walter Benjamin), psychoanalysis (Ferenczi), great women thinkers (Hannah Arendt). She is the author of studies on Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag, major American women intellectuals who shaped the link between modernism and theory:Gertrude Stein: Woman Without Qualities (2005) and In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag’s Critical Modernism (Edinburgh University Press 2016). She has written on language and literature and is interested in exploring literary/philosophical borders. She was educated at Rutgers University and has been a Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Weissman Center for Leadership, Mount Holyoke College.

Mitrano attends closely to matters of perception and style with the effect of perforating, through the conjoined forces of the critical practice depicted and the one at work in this book, the narrow confines of theory that persist to this day.

• Introduction: The archival relation; 1. Thoughts about Thinking: Approaching Sontag; 2. Aesthetic Experience and Critical Theory; 3. The Public Intellectual; 4. Modernism and Theory; 5. Iconologies; 6. Aura, Dread, and the Amateur; 7. Interlocution.